Monthly Archives: June 2011

Our technologies are not going to rob us (or relieve us) of our humanity. Our technologies are part of what makes us human, and are the clear expression of our uniquely human minds. They both manifest and enable human culture; we co-evolve with them, and have done so for hundreds of thousands of years. The technologies of the future will make us neither inhuman nor posthuman, no matter how much they change our sense of place and identity.

Technology is part of who we are. What both critics and cheerleaders of technological evolution miss is something both subtle and important: our technologies will, as they always have, make us who we are—make us human. The definition of Human is no more fixed by our ancestors’ first use of tools, than it is by using a mouse to control a computer. What it means to be Human is flexible, and we change it every day by changing our technology. And it is this, more than the demands for abandonment or the invocations of a secular nirvana, that will give us enormous challenges in the years to come.

I’m looking forward to it.

We could very well destroy ourselves with our technological power, but we could just as easily be destroyed by a meteor or a mutated virus, even if we did “return” to an idyllic, Edenic existence. The human race will, in all likelihood, join the 99% of all species that once existed but have since gone extinct, only to be replaced by others. (Hey, it’s just statistics.) When you realize that, it takes a lot of the moralizing fervor away from discussions of the pros and cons of technological developments. But a lot of people apparently still yearn for the dubious comfort to be found in a belief in predestination…

Now the problem is, traditional Buddhism doesn’t actually have anything distinctively useful to teach Westerners about ethics. There’s no single ethical system in Buddhism; it has a slew of contradictory half-systems. Worse, they are mostly quite conservative, often downright horrid, unacceptable to Westerners, and overall no better than the narrow Christianity the hippies rebelled against.

This means Consensus Buddhism has more in common with progressive Christianity (Unitarian Universalism or Liberal Anglicanism) than it does with any form of Asian Buddhism. (Much of the ethical thinking that went into p.c. was done by liberal Christians. Socialism and psychotherapeutic ideology were other major sources.)

…Within Consensus Buddhism, there is a huge emphasis on emotional safety. It’s non-confrontational, unconditionally supportive, peaceful, supposedly-inoffensive. This may be appropriate for children, or for people who are severely emotionally damaged. It’s repulsive and ridiculous as an approach for grownups.

Yes. This is another reason why I will say that Buddhism has been a significant influence on me while refraining from actually identifying as a Buddhist. Much of what passes for American Buddhism bores me to tears with its relentless saccharine sweetness.

Just as Korb was once a vegan, Niebuhr had been a pacifist, but the incarnate evil of 20th-century totalitarianism convinced him that such utopianism was tantamount to standing by at Auschwitz.

Christian love, for Niebuhr, can call us to war; by similar reasoning, Korb tells us that concern for animals can coincide with eating them.

Wow. I, uh… wow. Huh. Maybe the logic would make more sense if I were as God-besotted as Schneider is, but it does seem to me that not only is he trying to imply that eating animals is the best way to show concern for them – awfully convenient, that – but that abstaining from eating them is the equivalent of, uh, failing to oppose the Nazis? And who are these Nazis who will run roughshod over a vegan Chamberlain but quail in the resolute face of a carnivorous Churchill? Somebody ‘splain this to me, please; I don’t want to be arrested and charged as a war criminal next time I buy some Morningstar veggie burgers.

(I read Korb’s essay; it seemed to me to be a very lengthy exercise in saying, “Eh, it’s a fallen world, whaddayagonnado, thank God for situational ethics,” but your mileage may vary.)

Look. I’ve long been tired of arguing about this with people; I have better things to do than try to defuse the predictable defensive/antagonistic reactions to people learning of my vegetarianism. I have no illusions that there ever was, or will be, a world in which suffering and death don’t exist. I couldn’t care less about trying to convert anyone to a meat-free existence. If that’s conciliatory enough for you two, perhaps you could reciprocate by dropping the pretense of ethical justification for your choices and just admit that you simply like eating animals, regardless of necessity.

I’m not against e-books in principle – I’m tempted by the Kindle – but the more they become interactive and linked, the more they multitask and offer a hundred different functions, the less they will be able to preserve the aspects of the book that we actually need. An e-book reader that does a lot will not, in the end, be a book. The object needs to remain dull so the words – offering you the most electric sensation of all: insight into another person’s internal life – can sing.

There is a two-step process here. First, you accept the mundane. You accept the boredom and the toil of life in general. You even willingly push it to its extreme and sign up, for instance, to work at the IRS for the rest of your life. There you can become one with the boredom. You can have an experience that is not, on the face of it, special in any single way. But if you are truly attentive to the details, if you concentrate on the minutia like a Hasid davening before a sacred text, then you have come out through the other side of boredom into a heightened relationship to the here and now.

In fact, the collection of characters at the IRS that Wallace tracks in The Pale King are all mystics of the boring in one way or another. One character with almost autistic literalness and attention to the details of tax-code reaches states of concentration that find him levitating above his desk. Another character spent his childhood in the obsessive, body-contorting, yogi-like process of attempting to kiss every spot of flesh on his own body. These people have come to the IRS not because they’ve given up on life, but because they have discovered what they consider to be a secret at the heart of life. It is the boring that leads you to real reality. It is the mundane that is the door into the extraordinary. The things that seem, at first, to be exciting and pleasurable are actually a trap. They lead to emptiness.

To me, what Buddha was really looking for was a way to live a life that doesn’t suck. Hedonism didn’t work because hedonism sucked. It looked like fun, but it really wasn’t. Austerity sucked too. It provided a kind of high, but that high didn’t make him happy. Instead he found the Middle Way between the two.

Buddha was not looking for a way to make all of us clones of whoever comes along claiming to be the manifestation of “adulthood.” He was not looking for a way to make us all “serious” in the conventional sense. He wasn’t an authoritarian leader looking for obedient followers. He was looking for a way to help people live a life that did not suck.

Buddhism is about enjoying your life. The goal of zazen practice, if there is one, is to learn how to enjoy living as thoroughly as you can. This is what I am working on. Nothing else. I am working on having as much fun while I’m here as I possibly can without hurting anyone or impeding their ability to have fun.

Now Peter Toohey has written a short book defending drudgery. Dismissed in the past because it is not a big, passionate emotion like love or hate, boredom, he argues, should be respected and cherished rather than feared and reviled. It is adaptive, “in the Darwinian sense.” Not only can boredom “illuminate certain very famous pieces of art and literature,” but, “boredom has in some ways been a blessing.” This distinctly un-romantic effort strikingly rejects older philosophical ideas warning that dullness might lead to crime, addiction, or death. “Boredom doesn’t cause anything,” Toohey proclaims. But his book does not merely aim to transform boredom from ugly duckling to swan. It strives to prove that so-called existential boredom might not exist.

Boredom itself has been around under various guises and names—acedia, horror, tedium vitae, and melancholia—for centuries. Common wisdom has it that modern boredom began during the Enlightenment, with increased leisure time and the loss of faith. It grew with modernity and rose to epidemic proportions in nineteenth-century France, and, thanks to technology and the expansion of the self, it has become ubiquitous in our times. For Patricia Meyer Spacks, in Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind, boredom is nothing less than an “explanatory myth of our culture.”

I just thought it was interesting to notice all these variations on a theme recently. I’m not necessarily making any grand claims for dullness (though I will proudly assert my claim to be the most boring person you know) but it seems we all agree here that an excess of stimulation interferes with an ability to focus, yes? And that amazing things can develop in your awareness when you stop letting your eyes and mind wander? Thoughts need time and space to sink their roots down deep in order to become interesting, and the quietude of what most people call boredom is a good place to find them.

Summer concert season is upon us, a time for most music lovers to leave their headphone jacks at home and mingle in the sticky air on picnic tables and open pavilions. But it’s just another three months for those who love music and don’t care for concerts. Like me.

For me, music is a scrim lowered into the world. A scene moves around me, and a separate group of thoughts and senses develops behind the melody inside a sheen of privacy. Fader on you, solo track on me. I listen to music to be alone.

I’m no agoraphobe. I watch football at bars and baseball in stadiums, but sharing sports with 10,000 fans feels as natural to me as sharing music with a thousand strangers feels unnatural. Watching sports compels me to reach out, to high five, to shout and connect. Listening to music inspires all the opposite reactions: internalization, thoughtfulness, something private and quiet.

Same here. I’ve always appreciated the intricacies of studio wizardry over the spontaneity of live shows, though I sense that puts me in a minority. I’ve seen a few great club shows, but the majority of the arena/pavilion spectacles I’ve gone to have been largely forgettable. Music frees my mind to better focus and concentrate, which I like to do in solitude anyway.

Footsteps, sweat, caffeine, memories, stress, even sex and dating habits – it can all be calculated and scored like a baseball batting average. And if there isn’t already an app or a device for tracking it, one will probably appear in the next few years.

Brittany Bohnet, who was converted into a self-quantifier while working at Google, says she expects these gadgets will follow us in all aspects of our lives – even the most private. “Eventually we’ll get to a point where we use the restroom and we’ll get a meter that tells us, ‘You’re deficient in vitamin B,’” she says. “That will be the end goal, where we understand exactly what our bodies need.”

Socrates, Socrates; what do you have to say now, old chum? How about the overexamined life? Is that worth living?

I’m hoping that all this sustained narcissistic attention acts much like a magnifying glass and burns a hole in the very fabric of space/time through which our world can tumble, but that’s probably just me.

For now, researchers and consumers can only assume that when presented with a full pipeline of new drugs and better data on the safety, efficacy and public acceptability of male contraceptives, pharmaceutical companies will eventually see an opportunity for their profit margins. The hope is, “If you make it, they will come,” NIH’s Blithe says.

Yes. Yes, I suppose they will. Not that they weren’t already. In fact, that’s kind of the problem, isn’t it?

That’s from an article in Scientific American, talking about trying to develop a new male contraceptive. Scientific American. So, uh, I guess it’s safe to say that pun was unintentional…?

This is perhaps the most important lesson we can learn from a history of ideas: that intellectual life – arguably the most important, satisfying and characteristic dimension to our existence – is a fragile thing, easily destroyed or wasted.

Also, why has no one ever told me about the Journal of the History of Ideas? My gods, it’s like sacred nerd scripture! Check out his list of some articles that were current at the time of writing:

Plato’s effects on Calvin, Nietzsche’s admiration for Socrates, Buddhism and nineteenth-century German thought, a pre-Freudian psychologist of the unconscious, (Israel Salanter, 1810-1883), the link between Newton and Adam Smith, between Emerson and Hinduism, Bayle’s anticipation of Karl Popper, the parallels between late antiquity and Renaissance Florence.

*deep, shuddering sigh*

I’ve always said that I consider myself “intellectual” if you define the term as being interested in ideas for their own sake, regardless of any practical import they may have. And I’ve known for a long time that I loved Isaiah Berlin’s explanatory blend of history and political philosophy. This? This is about as close as I ever expect to get to finding my “thing” (I refuse to honor Calvin by referring to it as a “calling”). Oh, I’m in love.

I write in my notebook with the intention of stimulating good conversation, hoping that it will also be of use to some fellow traveler. But perhaps my notes are mere drunken chatter, the incoherent babbling of a dreamer. If so, read them as such.

Vox Populi

The prose is immaculate. [You] should be an English teacher…Do keep writing; you should get paid for it, but that’s hard to find.

—Noel

You are such a fantastic writer! I’m with Noel; your mad writing skills could lead to income.

—Sandi

WOW – I’m all ready to yell “FUCK YOU MAN” and I didn’t get through the first paragraph.

—Anonymous

You strike me as being too versatile to confine yourself to a single vein. You have such exceptional talent as a writer. Your style reminds me of Swift in its combination of ferocity and wit, and your metaphors manage to be vivid, accurate and original at the same time, a rare feat. Plus you’re funny as hell. So, my point is that what you actually write about is, in a sense, secondary. It’s the way you write that’s impressive, and never more convincingly than when you don’t even think you’re writing — I mean when you’re relaxed and expressing yourself spontaneously.

—Arthur

Posts like yours would be better if you read the posts you critique more carefully…I’ve yet to see anyone else misread or mischaracterize my post in the manner you have.

—Battochio

You truly have an incredible gift for clear thought expressed in the written word. You write the way people talk.